BeDeeJames Reviews

Kill Zone 2 (2015)

A beautiful gem but flawed upon closer inspection.

[7/10 · 12 August 2016]

I was super excited to watch this film after seeing the action packed trailer. Flying knees, elbows and shoot outs seem like a no brainer for any action fan. After the initial opening you will come to realize it isn't just any run of the mill martial arts film and you get a sense that they try to inject story behind the punches being thrown. The film itself is outstanding to watch but you cannot dismiss some of the flaws in storytelling, plot and pacing.

The story follows two main characters and many sub characters. Chai works as a Thai prison guard trying to support his ailing child suffering from leukemia. Kit is an undercover cop from Hong Kong investigating a black market operation of organ theft. Their paths intertwine and eventually they uncover the importance of how they need each other's help to save Chai's daughter Sa. It seems simple but how this concept is presented is a bit confusing. During the intro they focus on Chai and then switch to Kit. As you get invested in Chai's emotional desperation to help his daughter you get pulled away and presented with Kit's story and his own battle against his inner demons. Then sub plots with sub characters get their time to shine afterwards and the story loses its focus before fully developing the main characters. To make matters worse the director uses flash back sequences and the locations of Thailand and Hong Kong randomly jumps making you confused of the language change and locale. It can also be argued that Chai's character is a bit selfish as he seems only to care about saving his daughter at the expense of others. Kit's character is generally just recovering from his drug binge so neither character has a strong hold on the viewer. As a martial arts movie I generally don't take story too highly into account since your here mainly for the action but since a huge chunk of the run time focuses on plot it cannot be ignored.

The action can be brutal and some crazy wire work is involved but most of the choreography is realistic. You won't see people flying across roofs and running up walls and all the main combatants bring their A game. The fights are beautifully shot and the ending battle is one of the best I've seen. Some things that pull you away and can be quite distracting is that characters will often suffer injuries where you believe that they will be critically disabled, but those said characters will be in the next scene without any problems. It pulls away from the immersion and doesn't make sense when you knew for sure that person had died or should've died.

Kill Zone 2 also suffers from pacing issues. Some areas of the story can be very slow since they are trying to flesh out the characters. You can probably tell they didn't do a superb job of it and so for the first half of the movie you get a little action and a lot of dialogue. Then the movie starts to pick up and for the ending they kind of said eff it and threw non-stop action with very little story.

Kill Zone 2 has everything a martial arts fan can ask for. Story, top action stars and beautifully shot battles make it for a thrilling viewing experience. You just can't help but feel that this could've been a true classic if some the story plots were ironed out and connected you better with the main stars. The pacing may turn off action junkies for the first half but as the pace picks up it won't let you go.

Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance (2015)

Possibly the worst movie sequel of a 'so bad its good' cult movie

[2/10 · 4 February 2016]

Like many of you reading this review, I am one of those special individuals who enjoys watching bad movies because of the non intentional hilarity factor involved. A movie which has a cast and director who actually try to make a good movie but are not aware nor can cope with their lack of expertise, budget or comprehension of a proper film can have gut wrenching laughs.

Now enter the Samurai Cop 2. Building up from its cult following and the internet movement of glorifying old bad movies, it invested some money into creating a sequel to satisfy rabid fans. Now the problem is that the movie is too self aware about what's going on. The first film had an amateur director with big dreams leading a cast of actors who where desperately trying to build their acting portfolios and then suddenly everything crashed and burned. The second seems like it was trying too hard to re-create the tragic magic it had from the first film and instead of making a movie so bad its good, its just a terrible film. The cast and crew came into this movie knowing it was nothing special and it ends up being just that.

First off we can talk about the story. I have yet to figure out what the hell was going on. At first it seemed to make sense. Losing a loved one caused samurai cop to go into hiding. There's a clan war between two large gangs and they need him back to stop the impending chaos. After that you get random scenes of flash backs, poorly executed action scenes and reused meditation sequences of samurai cop on the beach. I know the story wasn't the main attraction but it created this vortex in which the more you tried to follow it the more you got lost in what was going on. It got to the point where you couldn't focus on the jokes because your brain was too warped from the messed up information it just received.

The actors that were in the film weren't great either, which is to be expected because they brought back many of them that were in the first film. The new characters consisted of porn stars and Tommy Wiseau to cater to those who enjoy gratuitous nudity and The Room. I am one of those people so that's where one of the stars from my rating is derived. I enjoyed Kayden Kross' performance and it's quite sad that her acting was better than most on set. Her black wig made her look like Jill Valentine...mmhhhmm...anyways back to the review.

The interior sets were poorly done consisting of reused basement rooms and decorated basement rooms to simulate places such as bars, clubs and building complexes. The colour scheme they used was really bright which almost rivaled tron for its neon use. They said they used the kickstarter money for special effects but it looks like basic animations and sfx that come free with a low end video editing software. They really screwed kickstarter backers if they spent 50k on elementary school cgi work.

The music was the other reason for the second star for this review. I enjoyed it and it set the mood quite well and hit the right notes to move you through the poorly acted scenes.

All in all I give this movie a 2 out of 10 starz rating. I would not recommend this film. They ruined perfectly good memories of the first bad film and didn't even try hard to make a good film which would end up being unintentionally bad. They should have used the budget and kickstarter money to make a porn parody as they could've used the same cast, been more entertaining and cost less money.